by Tim O'Brien
He jiggles.
He grabs my father’s arm.
“Jeez, come on!” he yells. “Stick it in my ear!”
A painful admission, but it’s true: Back then, in 1952, I loved Herbie with the same volatile, high-octane passion that now fuels my hatred. Same for Lorna Sue.
It’s been hard since she left me. Late at night I’ll jot down things to say to her in the event she calls someday. The word reptile is on my list. And lizard. And crocodile.
I cannot choose from among the three. Lizard has the virtue of specificity, crocodile even more so, but in the end reptile probably makes the strongest claim, most inclusive, most primitive and wicked and dangerous and cold-blooded.
Substance: the word gnaws at me.
Late at night, tormented, I find myself sliding up and down the scales of history, first here, next there, and eventually I return to a hot, windy beach outside Tampa, where not so long ago I lay feigning sleep while Lorna Sue chatted up her greasy new friend, a Tampa tycoon.
I was present. I heard it all. I smelled his Coppertone, seethed at his rancid pleasantries.
In the days afterward, almost without pause, Lorna Sue devoted our vacation to a slow, compendious recitation of the man’s virtues. (With each glowing item, by way of silent contrast, she was also devaluing and denigrating me.) The cocksucker was witty, she claimed. Generous. Thoughtful. At peace with himself. A good listener. Self-assured. Comfortable inside his own skin. Polite. Smart. A man of substance.
At this—finally—I balked.
We were flying home, I recall, and Lorna Sue had sighed and levered back her seat. “Most people with money,” she was telling me, “they’re not really comfortable inside their own skins, they’re not at peace with themselves, but he’s … well, obviously he’s a man of substance, but he still seems—”
“Who?” I said.
Lorna Sue blinked. “Well, you know.” (She then intoned the man’s name.) “He’s got—”
“Let me guess,” I said. “I’ll bet he’s got substance dripping out his nostrils.”
It was shortly thereafter that Lorna Sue suggested I see a counselor. I was paranoid, she claimed. I was irrational.
“First Herbie,” she said, “and now you’re jealous of—” (Again, painfully, she uttered the tycoon’s patently ridiculous name.) “I’m serious, Tom, you need help. It’s like you won’t … like I can’t have anybody else in my life. No friends. Not even a brother.”
I shrugged and closed my eyes.
Her allegations were without substance.
Tampa: it breaks my heart.
I stare at my airline ticket stubs and feel a great chill in my chest, a frozen sensation. I cannot catch my breath. For you, perhaps, the place might be Boston, or San Francisco, or Fiji, but in any case it strikes me that words, too, have genuine substance—mass and weight and specific gravity. I carry Tampa with me all day long, and to bed each night, and I fear my spirit has been warped by the burden. I dream in turquoise.
An interesting wrinkle. One hot afternoon, while staking out Herbie’s new house in Tampa, I happened across a spicy little item in the local newspaper. A Catholic church in the vicinity—Our Lady of Assumption—had burned to the ground three days before my arrival. No surprise: arson. The possibilities for vengeance did not escape me. Immediately, still seated in my rental car, I began composing an anonymous letter to the Tampa police force, alerting them to Herbie’s presence in their sunny city, providing key data regarding similar events in the small prairie town of Owago, Minnesota.
Can I be faulted for giggling as I posted my incriminating epistle that night?
(I cannot be.)
Even if by some curious fluke he was completely innocent—in fact, especially so—Herbie would soon be feeling precisely what I had felt on the day he invaded my marriage and my life. He would learn, as I had, the full meaning of such phrases as “circumstantial evidence” and “presumed guilt.” Late at night he would wake up screaming the word assumption.
A few weeks after returning from my third solo trip to Tampa, revitalized by my successes there, I had occasion to revisit the backyard of my childhood. Easter break, spectacular weather. My students had packed up their Levi’s and bad grammar, I packed my Wittgenstein and a pair of suits.
At a gas station near campus, as I took on fuel, a trio of young coeds sped by in a blood-red Camaro, giggling and honking at me, lifting their stubby middle fingers in salutation. I returned the greeting. (My students, it appears, consider me an odd duck. And why is this? Because I can spell cat without drooling? Because I refuse to fucking split my infinitives?)
Believe me, I am no duck. I am a man. I sail along with furled feathers, an ardent, lovable, hurting human being. A victim, in fact, of my own humanity. Remember: Herbie destroyed me. Lorna Sue sleeps with her tycoon in Tampa.
Enough—why bother?
Easter break, school dismissed, and I drove south through farm country, past pigs and soybeans, past a huge billboard indicating my arrival in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. (Fee-fi, ho-hum.) Two hours later, in early afternoon, I approached the outskirts of my pitiful history, a forlorn little prairie town tucked up against the Minnesota-Iowa border. Owago: Pop. 9,977. Off to my left, as I made the final turn onto Highway 16,1 took notice of the very cornfield in which Lorna Sue and I had once bared ourselves to the elements of autumn. Such zeal, such ardor. “It hurts!” she had cried, and who could blame her? A layer of frost had accumulated that night on the hood of my father’s Pontiac.
Now she lives in Tampa. Quack-quack.
Tired and hungry, battered by the road, I found humble lodging at the Shady Lane Motel, just off Main Street. (No shade, no lane. The professor in me shivers at such vacuity of language.) Enthroned in my room, I showered, rested, corrected papers, raged, wept, plotted, napped. Near dusk I returned to my car and executed a slow reconnaissance up Main Street. Why exactly was I here? In part, no doubt, out of desperation. And because the trail of human misery inevitably leads homeward. And, it goes without saying, for revenge: I yearned to cause hurt where the hurt would hurt most—at the roots.
And so I cruised—tooled, as my freshmen say—up and down Main Street. The town had changed little since my departure thirty-odd years earlier, still bleak, still threadbare. In modern dictionaries, under the word boring, you will find a small pen-and-ink illustration of Owago, Minnesota. Flat, bald, windy, isolated, desolate. (How impotent the adjective.) Proudly, a bit ridiculously, the town promoted itself as the Rock Cornish Hen Capital of the World, a grip on fame at once tenuous and pathetic. Firstly, the hen business had fallen on hard times; the graph spiraled downward. Secondly, it struck me as sad that a community’s grandest annual celebration boiled down to an event called Rock Cornish Hen Day. (In September of each year a banner is hoisted to the top of the water tower; ministers prepare sermons; housewives bake pies. At midday, a few hardy farmers truck their hens into town, dump them in front of the courthouse, then herd them up Main Street in a great clucking parade. The citizens of Owago watch from sidewalks. Then they go home.)
Odd duck? Me?
With these and related memories, I drove past the Rock Cornish Café, Wilson’s Standard Oil station, the courthouse, the First National Bank, the Ben Franklin store. Day had passed into dark by the time I parked in front of the tiny stucco house of my youth. There were no signs of animation from within. No lights, no sounds. The place seemed impossibly small, as if shrunken by the tumble of time, and for a moment I considered pointing the car back toward Minneapolis.
Instead, impulsively, I locked my vehicle and strode into the backyard. The birdbath was still there, and my mother’s rhododendrons, yet again I felt a curious compressive force at work. My whole life suddenly seemed puny and pitiful. My dreams had shriveled. My spirit too. (I had wanted to be a cowboy, for God’s sake, but here I was, a peddler of the English language.) I was struck, also, by the thought that Lorna Sue had represented my one true chance at happine
ss—my life raft, my lovely bobbing buoy—and now even that gallant vessel had gone to the bottom under the winds of marital treachery.
It made me want to cry.
And I did.
I lay beside the birdbath and made fists and blubbered at the moon.
Imagine my embarrassment, therefore, when only minutes later I was interrupted by a shrill, off-key, distinctly displeased female voice. I blinked away my grief. Above me, haloed by moonlight, loomed a tall, very shapely member of the wholly opposite sex. Stunning specimen, I thought, although at the moment she held a garden spade to my head.
“Trespasser!” she cried. “Don’t budge. Not one muscle.”
My position, of course, was awkward. (Supine. Teary face. Spade at my skull.) To my advantage, thank goodness, I was dressed in respectable garb, a blue wool suit and a silk tie, and with this modest consolation I sat up and introduced myself.
“Thomas H. Chippering,” I said merrily. “Professor of linguistics.”
My captor was not enthused. “Professor?” she muttered. “In somebody’s backyard? On private property? Bawling like a three-year-old?” She poked at me with the spade. “What is this anyway?”
“Apologies,” I said.
“Sick man.”
“Of spirit,” I admitted. “May I stand?”
“Not yet.”
The woman appraised me with a blend of fear and curiosity, perhaps slightly shaded toward the latter, and I therefore seized the opportunity to outline my circumstances: that the world had recently dealt me a number of knockout blows, among them faithlessness and divorce. I explained, too, that I had spent my early youth in this very backyard, a child of Owago. “Granted, it may seem peculiar,” I said, “but if we could only … Seriously, may I stand?”
She shook her head. “You could’ve knocked. Asked permission.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you were … Listen, you were crying.”
“Right. That too.”
The woman hesitated then withdrew her spade a fraction. “Divorce, you said?”
“Eight months ago Thursday. Crushed. Heartbroken.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “So it’s like an anniversary sort of? That’s why you’re here crying in my backyard?”
“More or less. Seeking answers.”
“Well, God. I should call the police.”
“You should not,” said I. “You should offer me a drink.”
The woman relaxed her grip on the spade. Here came the moment of decision, plainly, and as a signal of good faith I smiled and displayed my huge, pale, innocent hands. (With due modesty, yet truthfully, I must point out that I am not an unattractive man—tall and craggy in the mode of certain stage actors. Virile as Secretariat. A war hero.) No surprise, therefore, that a surrendering twitch came to the corners of my captor’s pliant, full-lipped, well-moistened mouth.
“Water,” she grunted. “One glass. Then you’re out of here.”
Home sweet home.
Inside, escorted by this handsome female prototype (who had by now introduced herself to me as one Mrs. Robert Kooshof), I stood in the long-lost kitchen of my youth: same gas stove, same breakfast nook, same pink Formica cabinets. Briefly, I had to stave off another wave of tears, and it was fortunate that Mrs. Kooshof chose that moment to place a plastic tumbler on the kitchen table. “Water,” she said. “Drink up.”
I smiled gratefully, helped myself to a chair. I sensed a turn of mood, a new warmth. (The whole kitchen, for that matter, was positively fragrant with innuendo. Standard stimulus-response. I have grown used to it.)
“And your husband?” I inquired. “Mr. Robert Kooshof. He would be returning when?”
There was a little shift in her eyes. “Five to seven years. Tax fraud. I’ve been thinking about divorce myself.”
“I see.”
“You don’t see.”
“Very true, but I was only—”
“And don’t condescend,” she said. “You’re not exactly a welcome guest on the premises.”
“No,” I murmured. “Nor inexactly.”
Mrs. Kooshof shot me a look. “Right there. That’s condescension.”
And so once again I found myself apologizing, a form of discourse that has never fallen within the perimeter of my special genius. (Arrogant, I am falsely called. Supercilious.) Cautiously, over a second glass of tap water, I did my best to make peace with my bewitching host, outlining the sequence of events that had carried me back to this squalid piece of the prairie. Betrayal, I said. Marital treason. Once or twice Mrs. Kooshof came close to nodding—a definite thaw in progress—and it occurred to me again that I was in the presence of a truly unique representative of the malleable gender. (Mid-thirties. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Busty as Nepal. One hundred fifty well-muscled pounds.)
Here, I recognized, was a Dutch beauty only marginally tarnished by the years. A woman with substance.
“Tax fraud?” I said casually.
She glanced up. “Don’t pry. It’s not something I talk about.”
“Certainly not, but if you should ever … Well, I’m in your debt. Friends already, are we not?”
Mrs. Kooshof shrugged her magnificent shoulders. “Let’s not jump the gun. Anyway, you’re the one bawling in the backyard.”
“True,” I sighed. “Human folly.”
“So you messed her over?”
“Messed?”
“The ex-wife,” said Mrs. Robert Kooshof. “I’ll bet the lady left you for pretty good reasons. It’s always something.”
“Not in this case,” I said stoutly, but then, in the next instant, I noted my error. The correct course, given her pitiless gaze, would be to temper self-defense with fragments of truth. “Perhaps one or two minor infractions. Petty nonsense.”
Mrs. Kooshof laughed—aloud, fizzy, uncorked laugh. She took a seat beside me at the table. “Infractions,” she muttered. “I can’t wait.”
“You’re sure?”
“The abridged version.”
And thus I sketched out the depressing parabola of my life: Herbie and Lorna Sue, the crucifixion episode, Herbie’s incredible jealousy. How for years he had plotted to undermine my marriage. And how with a single stroke he had driven my precious wife into the bed of a two-bit Tampa tycoon.
It was then—unexpectedly—that I choked up. No tears, thank God, but I was compelled to ask if there were spirits on hand.
“Bourbon?” said Mrs. Kooshof.
I would have preferred schnapps, yet even so I moved an encouraging hand to her thigh.
“Bourbon,” I said, “might be just the ticket.”
In short, what a glorious spring break! What a reprieve from despair and self-pity!
I had the run of the house. I had flannel sheets, pot roast, apple bread, chocolate chip cookies, and Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Very curious, is it not, how such detours pop up along life’s unfolding freeway? How at odd moments we find ourselves tapping the brakes, gearing down, bumping along past spectacular and untamed vistas? Even in times of mental anguish, or perhaps especially in such times, we are suddenly visited by the rare wine, the winning bingo card, the out-of-the-blue phone call from a forgotten old flame.
Diversions, to be sure. The detour ends. The freeway awaits us. My torment, in other words, did not vanish—I am hardly so fickle. Hour to hour, Lorna Sue lingered at the tip of my thoughts like some sour afterscent: Thursday’s head cold, last night’s cabbage.
The hurt remained, yes, but Mrs. Kooshof did much to file off its sharpest edges. We sported between flannel sheets, watched televised crime dramas, depleted her bourbon, recovered with long walks up and down North Fourth Street, past the United Methodist Church and Mrs. Catchitt’s house and the elementary school where Herbie and Lorna Sue and I had once endured our ABCs. Mostly, though, we commiserated. Held hands. Exchanged horror stories. Mrs. Kooshof’s husband, I came to learn, was a veterinarian by trade, now serving his five to seven in Stillwater. “At first it was tax fraud,” she said b
itterly. “I mean, that was bad enough—feds everywhere—but the creep was stealing from me too. Spending it on women. No joke, he had the bitches tucked away like spare parts. Over in Sioux Falls. Windom, Jackson, Mountain Lake. Two up in Pipestone. And I didn’t have even the slightest inkling. Zero. Stupid me, but I never thought Doc was the type. I thought he was sort of—you know—I thought he was a veterinarian. What a nightmare.”
“Doc?” I said.
“Robert—my husband. And it’s a small town too. Everybody knows.”
I assumed my gravest classroom demeanor. “You have my sympathy,” I told her. “Hideous, I know, but if you don’t mind, may I take a moment to recommend the path of reprisal? Old-fashioned vengeance. In my own case, I must say, I’ve found it most gratifying.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, indeed. Swift, stern, merciless punishment.”
Mrs. Kooshof looked up at me with a pair of hot Dutch eyes. “Punishment how?”
“By whatever methods you might prefer,” I said, then went on to delineate my own personal program. “My plan,” I said bluntly, “is to remarry her.”
Mrs. Kooshof nodded. “That would hurt.”
“Break up her marriage. Win her back. And then dump her like a truckload of used diapers. Tell her not to be an eighteen-year-old.”
“You’re serious?”
“That I am.”
A short silence followed. We were entwined in bed, Mrs. Kooshof’s blond curls at my belly. (As mentioned, she was a large, healthy woman, hefty across the upper torso; my left arm had gone numb beneath her bulk.)
“So what about me?” she said.
“You? How so?”